Dirt — we’re running out of it

Our favorite MacArthur “genius” fellow — OK, the only one with whom we’re acquainted — is Dave Montgomery of the University of Washington, who holds forth tonight at Town Hall on a subject near and dear to our heart: dirt.
Yep. Dirt. We’re running out of it, Montgomery points out in his book “Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations.” He outlines how our modern agricultural practices — and even ancient ones, such as tilling the soil — are causing the erosion of soil across vast stretches of of the earth. This happens at a rate of maybe a millimeter a year, though, Montgomery explained this morning on KUOW’s Weekday:

Soil erosion happens fairly slowly, so you have to watch over your entire lifetime to get a handle on the magnitude of the problem, and then project out over more lifetimes to see the ultimate result on societies. And that’s not something that people are terribly hard-wired to do. …

We’re really good at thinking in the moment, short-term thinking. We’re not that great at long-term planning, let alone intergenerational planning, thinking five, six, seven generations down the road.

Montgomery, a geomorphologist, relates how salinization did in the original big agricultural society, Mesopotamia, at the Tigris and Euprhates rivers — modern-day Iraq. We had a similar experience in this country in California.

Modern-day use of pesticides, petroleum-based fertilizers and intensive modern farming methods have exacerbated the problem, Montgomery says:

We essentially are poisoning the soil to feed ourselves. It’s a longterm strategy that makes absolutely no sense.